Why Kosovo's Gay Rights Film ‘The Marriage' Shocked Its Own Director When It Was Released

A version of this story about “The Marriage” first appeared in the Foreign Language Issue of TheWrap's Oscar magazine.
“The Marriage,” the first feature from award-winning shorts director Blerta Zeqiri, is a love triangle of sorts between a couple who are about to be married and the groom-to-be's gay lover, who returns to Kosovo and stirs up old but repressed feelings.
The film is Kosovo's entry in this year's Oscar foreign-language race, and this interview is one of a series of conversations TheWrap is having with the foreign directors.
Also Read: Oscars Foreign Language Race 2018: Complete List of Submissions
When we spoke in 2013, you said that you and your husband were writing a film about gay rights in Kosovo. Is this that film?
BLERTA ZEQIRI Yeah, it took us this many years to write it because I wanted to do the film with improvisations, the way I work in my short films. But nobody would give us money to work like that.
So we had to do all the improvisation before. We took three and a half years to...